Sex Discrimination

Mrs. Liu could have had three daughters by now. But the shame and legal costs would have been unbearable, so she gave her second daughter away at birth and aborted a third when an ultrasound scan showed that fetus, too, was female. In 1949, the Communist Party took power promising to end centuries of degradation for China's women. Yet hundreds of thousands of unwanted baby girls are abandoned, aborted and even killed each year. For poor, rural families, the choice is as stark as it is cruel.

In 1975, Nebraska Sen. Roman Hruska warned a congressional hearing that college football was in mortal danger. The threat came from Title IX, the 1972 measure that outlawed sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal financial assistance. To comply with the law, Hruska feared, colleges would have to equalize athletic budgets for male and female sports, and the only way to do that would be to raid the football budget. "Are we going to let Title IX kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in those colleges and universities with a major revenue-producing sport?"

In a speech that provoked angry rebuttals from administrators and some students, U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett charged Monday that Stanford University's recent change in Western Culture studies was "an unfortunate capitulation to a campaign of pressure politics and intimidation." Bennett told a campus audience that protests by minority students scared the university into dropping a mandatory reading list of 15 classics from the course required for all freshmen.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti 's search for a new fire chief has been framed largely by well-publicized problems with the agency's 911 dispatch system and reports of delayed responses to life-and-death emergencies. But another deep-rooted, if less noticed, challenge awaits the next chief: the continuing, costly legacy of race and sex discrimination in a uniformed force that remains overwhelmingly male and predominantly white. Over the last year, payouts in bias-related lawsuits have climbed, the federal government has stepped up its response to employee discrimination complaints, and an internal City Hall battle has raged over voter-imposed reforms intended to combat misconduct in the ranks.

Veteran minor league umpire Pam Postema filed a federal sex discrimination complaint Thursday, charging that the American and National leagues passed her over for promotion from the minors because of her gender. The complaint was filed with the U.S. Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission and also listed the triple-A Alliance of Professional Baseball Clubs and the Baseball Office for Umpire Development.

One current and three former female brokers sued Citigroup Inc.'s Smith Barney unit Thursday, accusing the brokerage of discriminating against them and other female employees. The suit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, claims that Smith Barney steered accounts to male brokers and gave women fewer opportunities to increase their commissions.

A female sound engineer with NBC News in Burbank filed a $10-million discriminationsuit against the network Wednesday, alleging that it has kept her and other women from becoming camera operators. The civil complaint filed by Lee Serrie, a 12-year network employee, in Los Angeles Superior Court claims that "NBC-TV has no women camera operators working in any of their network facilities and they have only three women sound engineers in the nation."

Kohler Co. has agreed to pay $886,500 to more than 2,000 women who were refused jobs because they were considered too short. The plumbing fixture company, based in Kohler, Wis., agreed to settle a Labor Department suit accusing it of sex discrimination for its practice of hiring only workers who were at least 5 feet, 4 inches tall. The rule was intended to make sure employees could handle physical labor, the company said.

A Del Mar woman passed over for promotion and then fired from La Jolla-based Science Applications International Corp. won $3.1 million Tuesday in court, the largest award ever issued by a San Diego County jury in a sex discrimination suit. Bernice Stanfill, 48, who in 16 years with the company worked her way up from secretary to corporate vice president, was passed over for promotion in favor of one man, then another a few years later.

A former NAACP employee is suing the civil rights group for $250,000, claiming its executive director breached the terms of a sex discrimination settlement, the NAACP's attorney said Thursday. Mary Stansel of Washington, a former interim assistant to executive director Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., filed the lawsuit in Superior Court in the District of Columbia on June 30, said Abbey Hairston, attorney for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against California's prisons agency for alleged sexual discrimination against an employee. Joe B. Cummings, a cook for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), alleges that he was sexually harassed for more than a year by a female co-worker until she was put on administrative leave for an unrelated reason in 2009. The lawsuit announced Thursday by federal attorneys was filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and alleges Cummings was subjected to frequent unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances, including profane and suggestive comments and inappropriate touching. In August 2008, the co-worker forced her hand down Cummings' pants and struck him in the head, the lawsuit alleges.

After graduating from Vassar College in 1966, Elisabeth Coleman sought a job in journalism "as an assistant to a smart man. " She found such a position as a researcher at Newsweek magazine in New York. In those "Mad Men" days of suffocating sexism, editing and reporting at the big newsweeklies were jobs done almost exclusively by men. Bright women like Coleman did the legwork, an arrangement she did not question - at first. Four years later, however, the revolution was underway.

More than 500 current and former female employees of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have filed discrimination claims against the retailer with the U.S. Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission after a national class-action lawsuit was blocked by the Supreme Court last year. The claims were filed to preserve the women's rights to pursue individual and regional class-action suits against Wal-Mart over alleged discrimination on pay and promotions, their attorneys said. "The fight continues to seek justice for the women employees of Wal-Mart," said Joseph Sellers, one of the attorneys representing the women, in a statement.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that female employees of Wal-Mart could not band together to sue over what they said was pervasive gender discrimination by the iconic retailer. The legal issues in the case were complicated, but the central question was a simple one and the court got it wrong. As a result of the decision, serious allegations against Wal-Mart dating back a decade won't be tested in court, and similar lawsuits against other employers will never be undertaken at all. The overall decision was 9 to 0 in favor of Wal-Mart.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a ruling that may mean new limits on class-action suits, rejected an effort to sue Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for discrimination on behalf of potentially a million female workers. The justices said the lawyers pressing the case failed to point to a common corporate policy that led to gender discrimination against workers at thousands of Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores across the country. The court ruled unanimously on some aspects of the case and divided on others.

The Supreme Court has agreed ? ominously ? to consider derailing a sex-discrimination lawsuit against the giant retailer Wal-Mart. If the justices rule that the class-action suit can't go forward, Wal-Mart employees may not be the only ones to be denied a meaningful day in court. The allegations against Wal-Mart, which haven't yet been put to a trial, are that women are paid less than men for comparable jobs and that women receive fewer promotions. But those issues aren't before the Supreme Court.

Faced with the possibility of paying multimillion-dollar damages, Lucky Stores settled a sex discrimination lawsuit filed by a former employee, attorneys said Wednesday. The settlement was reached late Tuesday night after Orange County Superior Court Judge William F. McDonald tentatively ruled that Robin Henry had been mistreated by the supermarket chain's administrators in Buena Park. The terms of the settlement were kept confidential by both sides.

One of four women lawyers in the Pasadena city attorney's office suing the city for sexual discrimination has settled for $75,000 plus a pay raise, officials confirmed Friday. The settlement with Assistant City Atty. Carolyn Y. Williams was approved by the Pasadena City Council on Monday and is much more than the $20,000 the city offered Williams in September. Williams attorney, Joe Hopkins, would not say how large a raise his client would receive but said it would be substantial.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday awarded $2.25 million to a police officer who said she was discriminated against and sexually harassed by her male colleagues and supervisors, and then retaliated against when she complained.

As her chances of becoming vice president recede, some of Hillary Rodham Clinton's supporters are pushing for the Democratic Party's new platform to state that the primary elections "exposed pervasive gender bias in the media" and to call on party leaders to take "immediate and public steps" to condemn future perceived instances of bias.